Where I never meant to be

trauma

There is a dog that comes to school. He belongs to VP Ma’am. Keep in mind, she has mixed feelings about pets and feels sorry for animals and feeds them, but doesn’t really like them. So it’s her dog, but don’t imagine great affection between them.

He comes to school, as lot of dogs, and it’s probably partly about company and partly about free food, because whatever the kids don’t eat, they just dump on the ground for the dogs. Since parents here are often worried about their kids getting enough to eat (an era of starvation probably remains lodged in their subconscious), our dogs are well fed.

What strikes me about the dog is that, unlike other dogs around here that are kept as pets, he won’t allow anyone to touch him. He does not believe anything good can come of physical contact.

It brings home to me how, in human beings, dysregulated parents too unpredictable to decipher create children who have worked out what distance it is safe to be from other people to stay safe while getting enough of their needs met to survive.

I wrote in a previous post about something I read regarding abused children, especially children taken into care having intrusions during the Strange Situation Procedure in which they approach the stranger for comfort and then, en route, collapse in confusion and fear. They really are caught between two instincts: to seek proximity and to flee.

When I think back on C’s simmering anger, sometimes it was because I had crossed that line of what felt safe or, in some cases, she had crossed that line: she was braced to defend herself. I don’t know how to describe the change in my perspective. Declarative knowledge of how traumatized children experience the world alone lacks sufficient detail to be convincing. You need to know how feelings feel, what it makes faces look like, and the kinds of experiences which lead to those reactions. I had not fully grasped the reality of it.

In college, I had a much older friend enrolled alongside the rest of us emerging adults, and she was caught up in a destructive relationship with one of my classmates. Once, she described the classmate as, “Come here, Now go away.” Traumatized people can rely on exerting inappropriate or excessive forms of control, but I don’t know that giving conflicting messages about closeness was exactly a form of control. Equally likely, she was responding to her own instinctive responses to needing support, but feeling afraid during an approach.

I also think maintaining the distance that kept you safe as a child is likely to be taught to the next generation, however distance is maintained–whether you skate lightly over the surface in conversation, or strive for perfection so as not to have any vulnerability, or avoid in-person or real-time interaction. I think the child who finds the right balance between need and fear grows up to be a parent who teaches this same balance to her children, because memories of parent-child interactions surface when she is with her own child. Fear of her parent colours into fear of her child. It’s also carried into romantic relationships, because these are support-seeking/support-giving (attachment) relationships.

It may look and talk like independence, but it is not. It is fear.

In couples therapy, we once completed an exercise in which we drew our personal space in the carpet with our fingers. Mine was so small, I couldn’t stay inside it. What the therapist missed was my wish that at least my own body might be safe. It’s not that I don’t want any buffer space between me and the rest of the world, but I had never had the right to any space at all.

My partner at the time said that we would both need to leave the room for her to feel safe–not even a bedroom-sized therapy room was enough.

I realize now the default for mentalizing other people’s desires and intentions on her part was so determined by previous, abusive or exploitative experiences that she really could not contemplate what anyone might be trying to do in the present. Which, of course, makes it even more scary and confusing, because if you aren’t trying to harm or exploit her, you become an inscrutable mystery.

One of my realizations a few years ago, which sounds slight, but has massive implications for my social life, is that I am unlikely to be the only one in any group to have been traumatized. It’s not me in the midst of normal people. It’s me with a scattering of people who have psychological issues similar to mine, and I had better get it worked out what’s going on with all of us, because I can’t just excise all of them out of my life.

Even if I don’t want to be close to other people with my issues–and they are the ones most likely to understand what I am going through–I work with them. They sit in my classroom.

It helps a lot to understand why people might be acting on instincts to move forward or flee (or fight) and to be mindful when it’s happening so that I can recognize it and react in a gentler way. It should also be helpful to see when I am caught up in these conflicting instincts myself.

What I mean by that is it’s evident to me that I cannot manage my brain anymore and my sense of myself is rapidly switching between states. So I want to die and then I feel fine. This does not actually sound better, but I do feel better.

It was a long day. I didn’t go to class or teach. They are holding a principal’s meeting and we were in charge of decorating the hall where it was held, which is rather an elaborate affair as there aren’t, for example, curtains hung permanently and these had to be borrowed and temporarily hung with plastic twine (after long discussions about what to do.)

I was on my feet a lot, so I am tired, and I also spent all day working out how to pitch in and help when I can’t understand what people are saying.

They were providing dinner at school, but I left a little early. It seemed as though the work was wrapping up and I had already cooked in the morning. There was something I needed to buy and I knew I would forget later. So I went.

I feel better because, although my brain is falling apart, I feel I may know something of the cause and I also think I can get through the evening alright like this.

I have been reading a lot about self-conscious emotions–especially shame and guilt–and I feel it gives me more to work with at those times when I feel bad and also more ways of understanding early trauma.

First of all, guilt develops much later than shame. Guilt doesn’t show up until around 7 or 8, probably because guilt is connected to negative experiences and internal, controllable, unstable causes. Shame shows up by 3 and is linked to negative events and stable, internal, uncontrollable causes. However, young children feel ashamed of all negative events with internal causes. They don’t distinguish between outcomes within their control and events outside their control, probably because they lack the cognitive capacity to hold so many elements in mind long enough to to figure all of that out. They may also lack the experience to know what is stable about themselves and what is unstable: you feel guilty if normally you can do something and flounder, but ashamed if you regularly struggle with it. That’s the difference between a mistake and a character flaw. Very young children also don’t distinguish well between internal and external causes. They expect others to feel proud over lucky breaks and ashamed over bad luck. (Although they themselves may feel more visibly proud over success in difficult tasks as compared to easy ones.)

What that says to me is those very early traumas which now stimulate washes of shame felt that way to me when they happened, because I could not reason well enough to know what caused them. I just knew they were bad. Shame was the best sense I could make of things. I really could not do better. Even in situations which repeated at later stages in my development, I don’t think I could revise my understanding of them, because they were so overwhelming to think about.

Something else I ran across is that toddlers feel upset about lost, broken or messy things. Rules about intactess are adopted quite early. My memories of distress about bodies being dismembered and believing parts of them could get lost makes sense in this light. I didn’t understand murder, but I knew about the importance of wholeness.

I was also reading that shame (adult shame) comes from deficiencies which are core to your identity. So if I see myself as an independent person or I aspire to be independent, then I will felt ashamed at instances of dependency. But I won’t feel ashamed if that’s not an important goal for me. The things that spark the worst s1q

hame act as clues to my values and my views of myself. I suspect they also serve as vulnerabilities for someone who uses attacks on the self to win in conflicts, as I think my ex did.

Fonagy talks about individuals reverting to developmentally earlier forms of mentalization or non-mentalization entirely under stress and he also talks about entire systems remaining in non-mentalizing states. He talks about teleological systems, in which only concrete actions can be understood. In this kind of system, individuals become coercive: aggressive means are used to force behaviours which mimic the appearance of care. (I know you care about me, if you do want I want you to do. Hystrionic behaviour can stem from this motivation: if I make you feel uncomfortable enough, then maybe I can make you things I recognize as caring.

Another system he describes is one called psychic equivalence: thoughts are seen as real, and so thoughts must be carefully controlled. Results are equated with intention. There are no accidents.

Finally, he describes pretend systems, and this one strikes a deep chord with me. Only one’s own thoughts and feelings are real. Other people have them, but they are not experienced as “real,” leading to feelings of isolation and emptiness as well as intense selfishness. Lack of sense of reality to feelings “permits interpersonal aggression,” because their emotional impact has no importance.

It also permits acts of self-harm, because psychological existence is seen as being decoupled from physical existence. (I can destroy myself, but only kill off the bad or unwanted part of myself.)

That was also my dad, who could kill animals and people, because their deaths were not felt to be real or to have importance.

They were real to me, and I felt pain and fear when I witnessed his violence towards others. It was decades before I understood this as normal. I grew up seeing only self-interest. I didn’t know I put myself in the place of corpses, because that is actually natural for people to do: not just I could be next, but I tried to understand what it was like to be them, to be dead and to be chopped up into pieces, because actually that is what people do. Imagining the experience of others is natural.

I have an understanding of what dissociation is and how it works that differs somewhat from mainstream psychological ideas. I have mentioned this, but I thought I would explain in more detail.

The standard definition is that dissociation has to do with a separation from an awareness of reality. But what is reality? It’s so many things. There are a thousand bits of sensory input from the external world—some of them important, some of them not. There are sensations in the body, how your skin feels, your heart beating, the sensations in your core that are your enteric nervous system and are part of how you experience of emotions. Then there are your thoughts, the pictures playing out in your mind or the verbal chatter of your mind making sense of things or imagining the future or remembering the past or just commenting on life. That’s all reality. Inside and outside of you is reality. It’s a lot of stuff, and normally we focus our attention on some elements of this reality that seem to be important and away from elements that seem to be unimportant. We cannot possibly maintain our conscious attention on it all, because it is too much to pay attention to at once.

We control our attention. All of us have only so much stimulation we can process and respond to at one time, and we do what we need to do in order to keep it in a range of what is possible and comfortable for us. Dissociation is this control of our own attention.

During traumatic experiences and later, the degree of mental and sensory stimulation is too much, and we shut certain things out of our awareness in the same way we normally do, but to a greater extent. This gets the degree of input down to a manageable level, so that what we are taking in is at a level of intensity we can make sense of and respond to. The more intense the experience, the more constricted we need to make our awareness.

We might shut out stimuli that are very painful so that we aren’t saddled with trying to respond to the pain in addition to doing what the moment demands of us—carry on a conversation, think about maths or whatever—or we might shut out everything but the pain so that we can deal with the pain and not what amounts to trivia. Or we might shut out one kind of pain so that we can attend to a second kind of pain. The stimuli are still being recorded. The knowledge of those stimuli is going somewhere, but we aren’t giving it our conscious attention and it isn’t being processed in the same way as what we are giving our conscious attention to in that moment.

If this goes on very regularly, you end up with a very fractured experience of life. You have a fractured experience of yourself, your past, and the world around you. This fractured experience does not occur separately from your social experience and development. If you are a child, and your personality is developing, your sense of self is going to occur in the same fractured way. So awareness of certain kinds of experiences, certain thoughts or certain feelings, is going to be separated from other kinds of experiences, and they are going to feel like different senses of self.

This creates problems.

It creates flashbacks, for one. As we move through life, we are automatically comparing the present experience to other experiences in the past to see which experiences it might be like so that we can use that information about past experiences to help us be successful in the present in how we respond. At the same time, we are discarding experiences that might at first glance seem similar but aren’t.

But trauma is in bits. The process of mining the past for comparable experiences becomes very difficult, because the memories aren’t rich enough or integrated enough to yield discomfirming details.

I’ll use my bathroom floor as an example. So, as most of you know, my bathroom floor is a kind of pebbly concrete that has been painted red. When I go in the bathroom, I see the floor first. It’s quite bright and noticeable. The most intense memory I have of red, pebbly surfaces involved murder and blood. It’s the first experience that comes to mind for comparison.

When this memory wasn’t processed at all, there was no way for my mind to discard walking into the bathroom as being quite unlike witnessing a murder. The rest of the pieces of that memory of murder weren’t processed. They were either totally unsorted—recorded, but not organized in any way—or stored separately. So every time I walked into the bathroom, the closest bits of that memory arose and presented themselves for sorting and processing and making sense of. Which was, of course, too much. I dissociated them again. And the process continued. It went on for quite a long time this way, until finally the memory was processed and integrated and not stored in a fractured way and so I can automatically discard murder as a memory quite unrelated to walking into the bathroom.

Dissociation of that kind also means you keep experiencing the world in a fractured way. The whole world becomes my bathroom—a possibly related experience that prompts memories of intense, overwhelming trauma—and it continues to be necessary to keep your attention restricted in order to keep life to a manageable level of input. So, it’s self-preserving.

One of the things I have done that has been helpful is to use this deliberate control of my attention to help me process the trauma. I went in the bathroom, and I didn’t pay attention to everything. I continued only paying attention to as much of the stimuli as I could and not more than that. I changed what it was that I paid attention to, but I didn’t try to do more, because biologically I can’t. I focused only on the emotion from the traumatic memory and on my attempt to regulate that emotion. About 1/100 of my attention was on scrubbing the laundry—that is what happens in the bathroom that involves looking at the floor for the longest stretches of time. But everything else was on the emotion and on my attempt to regulate. I shut out the pictures of what happened and the sounds of what happened. I shut out most of my awareness of the laundry. I definitely didn’t let my mind trot on to to worrying about what to fix for breakfast or for how the day was going to go. I kept controlling my attention so that it was focused on the piece that was going to help me.

I felt the emotion in my body and I controlled my breathing. Mostly that is what I did to regulate my emotional state. It’s hard to do a lot else when you are in the bathroom and the floor is wet with laundry water. Sometimes I stood up, because that helps with the emotions too. (Being close to the ground is its own trigger.) But mostly I controlled my breathing, because that helps me stay calm. If I were in a different situation or had had more soothing skills, I might have done something else, but what I had was breath control, so I did that. I did that nearly every day for about six months.

Outside of the bathroom, I went on working with that memory. I shut out my awareness of where I am now, and I only thought of maybe one element of the sensory experience, one thought, one emotion, and I went on doing something to try to keep the emotional intensity down in an artificial way. I controlled my breath, or I wrapped myself up in blankets, or I cuddled a hot water bottle, because those things are calming. I kept using my attentional controls to help me process only the amount of the memory that could be successfully processed until I finally had an integrated, whole memory that my mind now understands is quite different than walking into the bathroom.

And I think that is how you recover from trauma. You do something to lower the intensity of the emotions of the trauma—you do a lot of self-soothing and self-regulating—and you focus your attention very carefully so that it is on what needs to be processed but not more than that. Your attention is on only two things: one piece of the trauma and on the self-soothing. Until the trauma memories get sorted. But I am convinced that this is where it is mostly at, from the standpoint of what one needs to do: self-soothing or self-regulating and attentional controls.

Like this:

I have 200 rupee eye liner from India. It’s a nice brand: Lakme. But it’s different from what I’m used to in the US. It is black, for one. You can’t find brown mascara in India and so I bought black eye liner, thinking maybe they should match. The pencil is much, much softer, so that it goes on in a thick line regardless of how thinly I try to apply it. Mainly, I don’t.

I realized last night, putting it on for our farewell dinner with the Minister of Education, that it is made that way because that is how Indian women like their eye liner. When I do wear it, I need to change my paradigm for how eye liner should look. And I can do that.

Meanwhile, I felt like a whore. Specifically, I felt like a seven-year-old child being trafficked for sex. Because they did that: dressed me up in pretty dresses, applied heavy eye-make-up and let the cameras roll.

I felt that way because that happened. Internally, there’s a crush of both belief and disbelief. Because of the extent of my denial about my childhood, these kinds of experiences have felt to me like evidence that I’m over-reacting or histrionic or even crazy. But this is just how memory works.

Most of getting better for me has involved sitting with memories and simply being with them, being with myself while I relieve them in very intense and seemingly real ways. This kind of being with them can feel like ascending into the Underworld or entering a long, dark tunnel.

Sometimes, I come back from these little trips with bits of understanding. Other times I am just exhausted. But going there and coming back into normal life again, with the cat on the bed grooming herself, and the dust on my shelves and the laundry and things really not being so bad seem to be part of the process.

I set aside time for this–less as the years go by. It is a part of my weekend routine most certainly, and it used to be part of my daily routine. Not pleasant, I can tell you, but necessary.

I made one of those little trips down that long-dark tunnel into horror this morning and I came back with this little treasure. I thought perhaps others might be able to relate to it, so I thought I would share. And there is also an irony to it, so I thought I’d share that as well.

To so many people, I was only a body growing up. A hollow vessel, suitable for shoving things inside, capable perhaps of doing things also. I was, after all, enslaved. But for the people who used me, there was no expectation that anything existed inside me–no soul, no will, no feelings of my own. Only a body.

A lot of survivors of various kinds of abuse feel a split from their bodies, a distance. The body is the site of such intense pain, sometimes shame. I suppose I feel that too. But mostly I feel a profound desire to be more than simply a vessel, more than only a body that can do things. I want to be what I really am: a person, with a soul, and desires and feelings.

The irony I mentioned earlier is that the religious cult I grew up impressed upon me the same kind of split, but from the other direction. We were expected only to be soul, to deny our bodies, but also our individual will, desire, feelings, and ego. I’m not really sure what is left after that, or what is really meant by the soul in that context, but the fact is we were spoken about as empty vessels who also denied the importance of bodies. But still vessels.

I know I don’t want to be a vessel. I don’t think we were meant to be vessels. I think we were meant to be people, all filled up inside.

In addition to relentlessly planning ahead in tiny, tiny increments, I also feel everything needs to be done RIGHT NOW. TODAY. Or at least very, very soon.

That doesn’t mean everything gets done. Sometimes there is so much to do, I can’t figure out where to start or end or how to prioritize and nothing gets done at all. Sometimes I get overwhelmed. Sometimes I refuse to think about anything and start at the beginning of the work and keep plugging until someone calls time. And who knows if what was important got done or not. I did something. And then stopped.

But regardless of what has actually gotten done or not done, the sense of urgency has remained. Until now. When I thought quite suddenly, “I don’t have to do that now. I can do it tomorrow. I’m not going to die and leave it undone.”

I’m not sure how many people can relate to that: not a fear of death, but an expectation of death. All the “t”s must be crossed, the “i”s dotted, because I will most likely die within days of now and I will have left all of these embarrassing loose ends. The sink won’t have been cleaned, and there will be dirty socks on the floor, and dishes in the sink. And no one will be able to make heads or tales of the piles of paper on my desk that I didn’t get a chance to grade.

I don’t have cancer. Just an extreme view of mortality. And I should reassure you it’s not that my death scares me. I have just expected it, daily, for about the last three decades.

Until today. When I thought, “I can do this later. I’m not going to die.”